reading in all its glory
“Is reading Faulkner going to make you a better person? Absolutely not,” writes Jessa Crispin, “but the whole universe wants you to be optimized, productive, monetized. And sitting around and reading a work of art when it is not your job to do so is a rebellious act that insists I am a human being, actually, and not a cog, not a good little worker,... See more
austinkleon.substack.com
Writer and activist James Baldwin on the power of reading:
“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was Dostoevsky and Dickens who taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who ever had been alive.... See more
“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was Dostoevsky and Dickens who taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who ever had been alive.... See more
James Clear • 3-2-1: How to time travel, the power of reading, and being grateful when you don't have what you want
Reading, because we control it, is adaptable to our needs and rhythms. We are free to indulge our subjective associative impulse; the term I coin for this is deep reading: the slow and meditative possession of a book. We don’t just read the words, we dream our lives in their vicinity.
Sven Birkerts • The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age
READING: THE TERM is as generous and imprecise as “love.” So often it means more than just the word-by-word deciphering of the printed page.
Sven Birkerts • The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age
Fully engaged, we work with the writer to build our own book.
Sven Birkerts • The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age
It is easy enough in retrospect to see a book as a screen, a shield, an escape, but at the time there was just the magic—the startling and renewable discovery that a page covered with black markings could, with a slight mental exertion, be converted into an environment, an inward depth populated with characters and animated by diverse excitements.
... See moreSven Birkerts • The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age
I speak as an unregenerate reader, one who still believes that language and not technology is the true evolutionary miracle. I have not yet given up on the idea that the experience of literature offers a kind of wisdom that cannot be discovered elsewhere; that there is profundity in the verbal encounter itself, never mind what further profundities
... See moreSven Birkerts • The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age
As the world hurtles on toward its mysterious rendezvous, the old act of slowly reading a serious book becomes an elegiac exercise.
Sven Birkerts • The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age
For while it can be many things, serious reading is above all an agency of self-making.
Sven Birkerts • The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age
Once the habit of reading has taken hold—usually when we are very young—it cannot be easily dislodged.